Contact
arayburn@hawaii.edu
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Hello!
I'm an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Communication and Information. I teach in the Library & Information Science program. My scholarship is in the areas of digital curation and information science.
Specifically, my research investigates data practices in library, archive, and museum (LAM) collections from an intersectional feminist lens. I am interested in understanding how various communities create digital systems in LAM collections that are sustainable, maintainable, and resistant to the oppressive harms built into our society, and what barriers practitioners face when trying to do so. I also research the ways that LAM data work is gendered and systematically undervalued, and the impacts of this undervaluing on both 1) the professionals in these roles and 2) the quality of data produced.
I received my PhD and MSI from the University of Michigan School of Information and a graduate certificate from the U-M Museum Studies program. Before and during graduate school, I worked in a variety of cultural heritage settings. I’ve worked as a cataloger in a textile museum collection, a project archivist for corporate archives, a reference librarian, and as a library conservation technician. These experiences continue to inform my research and teaching.
I’ve published in Archival Science; Science, Technology and Human Values (ST&HV); Information and Culture, and more, along with practitioner-focused venues such as Museum Computing Network and the Digital Library Federation.
Here is my CV (last updated May 2025).
News
May 2025
I am thrilled to announce that in Fall 2025, I will be joining the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Communication and Information as an Assistant Professor.
I defended my dissertation!
Recently, I wrapped up a Doctoral Intern Fellowship with Deep Blue Repositories at the U-M Library. I developed reparative description guidelines and a remediation strategy for the institutional repository to implement. Thinking through questions of metadata harm and repair in a self-deposit repository was interesting, and something we hope other institutional repositories find useful. Check back soon for a copy of our guidelines!
November 2024:
New book chapter with Andrea Thomer discussing the role of paradata in natural history data migrations.
I received a dissertation fellowship from the Museum Studies program here at Michigan.
Last month I presented early dissertation findings at the Museum Computer Network. It was great being able to bring findings back to a community that has been so helpful in shaping this project.
June 2024:
New paper with Sony Prosper, Yvette Ramirez, and Ricky Punzalan sharing an assessment framework for memory institutions that are considering publishing digital projects that contain Indigenous cultural heritage material.
February 2024: New paper in Archival Science with Andrea Thomer and Ricky Punzalan. In this text we examine the socio-technical frictions that showed up for the Great Lakes Research Alliance (GRASAC) during their recent data migration. We unpack the notion of systemic friction, or the continual challenges of pushing back against colonial legacies in museum collections.
May 2023: New paper in ST&HV with Andrea Thomer. We explore how practitioners in museums and archive collections are maintaining their digital systems, highlighting database work as a craft.
April 2023: I participated in the AI & Archives Symposium hosted by the Sussex Humanities Lab. My talk, titled, Innovative tech and invisible labor: lessons from early museum computing, discussed the gendered histories of museum computing work.
February 2022: My poster with Andrea Thomer, "The craft of database curation: Taking cues from quiltmaking," won the best poster award at iConference!
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